A Quote by Edward Abbey

Most of the literary classics are worth reading, if you've nothing better to do.

Edward Abbey

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Edward Abbey
American - Author
January 29, 1927 - March 14, 1989

Essayists, like poets, are born and not made, and for one worth remembering, the world is confronted with a hundred not worth reading. Your true essayist is, in a literary sense, the friend of everybody.

William Ernest Henley

In my high-minded and naive way, I believed the only books worth reading were the classics.

Maria Semple

You will find most books worth reading are worth reading twice.

John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn

For the grand and inescapable tradition of western literary classics confronts us with fundamental choices over our understanding of words, reading and art, as well as citizenship, civilization, faith, and the whole notion of the true, the good, and the faithful.

Os Guinness

Reading for experience is the only reading that justifies excitement. Reading for facts is necessary bu the less said about it in public the better. Reading for distraction is like taking medicine. We do it, but it is nothing to be proud of. But reading for experience is transforming.

Henry Seidel Canby

Read the classics one hour every day, drunk or sober. Reading the classics gives one a feeling of confidence. It familiarizes one with the vagaries of life. It shows one that there are really no new plots.

Richard Haynes

...one of hallmarks of a creative person is the ability to tolerate ambiguity, dissonance, inconsistency, things out of place. But one of the rules of a well-run corporation is that surprise is to be minimized. Yet if this rule were applied to the creative process, nothing worth reading would get written, nothing worth seeing would get painted, nothing worth living with and using would ever get designed.

Ralph Caplan

I have always loved reading, so was interested in the literary world, and took many literary portraits.

Fay Godwin

I love poetry; it's my primary literary interest, and I suppose the kind of reading you do when you are reading poems - close reading - can carry over into how you read other things.

Jonathan Galassi

I enjoy classics, but classics are classics for a reason. I prefer to focus on the future. There are a lot of new stories to be heard.

Gugu Mbatha-Raw

It certainly is my opinion that a book worth reading only in childhood is not worth reading even then.

C. S. Lewis

I cannot stand Tolstoy, and reading him was the most boring literary duty I ever had to perform, his philosophy and his sense of life are not merely mistaken, but evil, and yet, from a purely literary viewpoint, on his own terms, I have to evaluate him as a good writer.

Ayn Rand

I didn't care for most of the books I was being asked to read in school. I started reading like crazy right after high school when I got a job in a mental hospital. I was working my way through college, and I did a lot of night shifts, and there was nothing to do. So I read like crazy, serious stuff, all the classics.

James Patterson

The literary gift is a mere accident - is as often bestowed on idiots who have nothing to say worth hearing as it is denied to strenuous sages.

Max Beerbohm

No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally – and often far more – worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond.

C. S. Lewis

By bells and many other similar techniques they (schools) teach that nothing is worth finishing. The gross error of this is progressive: if nothing is worth finishing then by extension nothing is worth starting either. Few children are so thick-skulled they miss the point.

John Taylor Gatto

A Quote by Edward Abbey

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